Is this what global warming looks like? Over 2000 new low temperature records set in October

In the continental USA, there were 137 high temperature type records versus 857 low temperature type records this past week , a 6-1 difference. Last week there were 1154 low temperature type records putting the two week total for October at 2011. There were also 24 new snowfall records set this week in the upper plains.

Once again, if this had been summer, and the numbers reversed, you’d see Seth Borenstein writing articles for AP telling us thisis ‘what global warming looks like’. So far not a peep out of Seth on this cold wave and what it is supposed to mean.

(Added) Here’s all the October lows plotted by week 1 and week 2 and composited on the US map:

No doubt the warmists will be telling us all that this is to be expected because of AGW. You can’t win! If it is cold it is because of AGW, if it is hot it is because of AGW.
Sunny and showery day here in NE England, NE wind, temperature is 8 celsius at 14:00. All of course due to AGW. If AGW was a person he/she would be paranoid!

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October 14, 2012 6:00 am

pat

anthony, there are two pics illustrating this piece, #2 relating to temperature, which you would
understand better than me. however, i do question Graham Lloyd’s declaration that we have experienced “an extraordinary run of extreme weather conditions”:
13 Oct: Australian: Graham Lloyd: Spring break just the weather, as usual
WILD storms and unseasonal snow that have lashed southeastern Australia this week mask a bigger shift in the nation’s weather pattern – back to normal.
The Bureau of Meteorology has downgraded its forecast for a possible El Nino weather system that would signal a return to the drier-than-normal conditions that wreaked havoc for much of the past decade.
If, as expected, the weather system returns to normal — neither El Nino nor the rain-bringing La Nina — it will break an extraordinary run of extreme weather conditions…
GALLERY: Snow in springtime …
The big-picture weather patterns have nothing to do with the wild storm events that dumped up to 18cm of snow on the NSW southern tablelands and on South Australia this week…
The weather pattern has been dramatic, but not particularly unusual.
Ms (Senior bureau meteorologist Julie) Evans said the spring snow conditions were last recorded in 2008. “We do tend to get these cold outbreaks this time of year,” she said.http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/spring-break-just-the-weather-as-usual/story-e6frg6nf-1226494747547
13 Oct: ABC: (incl. 2 VIDEOS, PLUS GALLERY) Snow causes havoc across eastern Australia
About 470 properties in the Blue Mountains will remain without electricity overnight after a day of wild winds, rain and snow.
At its height, snowfalls of 15 centimetres and wind damage cut roads and rail access to the upper Blue Mountains for more than six hours.
The Bureau of Meteorology says snow falls have occurred right along the Great Dividing Range and as far north as Queensland’s Granite Belt.
The wild weather also affected Sydney’s metropolitan area, with Sydney Ferries suspending services between Manly and Circular Quay due to big swells…
Endeavour Energy reconnected more than 2,000 properties to power on Friday afternoon, but hundreds of outlying properties between Mount Victoria and Medlow Bath and in the Megalong Valley will not get power back until Saturday.
With temperatures predicted to get down to 3 degrees Celsius overnight, the company has urged people in areas where the power is out to check on neighbours who live alone.
Blackheath resident Noelene Turner says she is staying in bed to keep warm…
But bureau forecaster Ewen Mitchell says while the snowfall is unusual, it is not unheard of at this time of year.
“I don’t think there’s been hugely heavy falls. [It’s been] fairly widespread,” he said.
“It’s certainly not record breaking in terms that it’s happened before.”…http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-12/snow-falling-across-eastern-australia/4308904?section=vic

Does it now mean that we won’t be barbecued in our beds overnight but instead be turned into popsicles. I will now have to trade my new bathers and sunblock for thermal underwear. This is becoming expensive.

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October 14, 2012 6:17 am

cui bono

andrewmhardinga says(October 14, 2012 at 6:00 am)
If AGW was a person he/she would be paranoid!
——–
Bipolar might be the more appropriate term.
Especially as Borenstein says nothing about the Antarctic, as well as ignoring record cold spells.

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October 14, 2012 6:23 am

beng

A hard freeze like yesterday morning, Oct 13, is early even for this frost hollow. Any plant that is frost-sensitive was turned to blackish mush.

AGW is old news. It is Climate Change that is the problem. Every fall human CO2 emissions cause the climate to change. In the Northern hemisphere is gets cold, in the southern hemisphere it gets hot. Every spring human CO2 causes it to change again in the reverse direction. This disrupts climate, thus it is called Climate Disruption. This process has been going on for as long as there have been humans on the planet, thus humans are the cause. We know this to be true because the US government has spent $100 billion paying scientists to say it is true.

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October 14, 2012 6:33 am

DonS

Yeah, Seth is busy writing about how AGW melts ice in the Arctic and increases ice in The Antarctic. And floes the size of Berlin (341 sq mi, ten times the size of Manhattan) are breaking off Antarctic glaciers. Turn out the lights. When a guy like this can continue to find an audience the communal intellect is nearly nil.

David Thomas Bronzich, great point. Like the one in North Carolina…there was a record high temp there, but nowhere else near it? Yet surrounded by a few states record low max temps?
It looks quite fishy.

Re: David Bronzich.
There is a cool bias in these maps in that when a station has both a high record and a low record, it is the low record that shows. My guess is that the records are printed in the left to right order of the legend. So that low temperatures overprint on the high records.
It is easy to follow the link to see for yourself. If you do it now and click on only the highs, you see many High Min records in West Central Texas and the panhandle. Click on the Lows and many of those Texas High Min dots change to Low purples.

Correction to 8:03. It ultimately is a warm bias. Obviously the drawing order is not left to right in the legend. Lows are plotted after High Min. Highs are plotted after High Mins. (as can be seen today at Big Bend Texas).
So it appears the points are plotted right to left in the legend. In which case the Highs will over print the all other points ( warm bias ), Low temps will over print all but the Highs. In the one today, there is a High on the central coast of South Carolina that overprints a Low Max Temp.
Frankly, I think this is a bug. Over printing is the easy thing to do, but the proper thing is to use another color when two or more categories are seen at the same station, especially if it is a mix of cool and warm records.

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October 14, 2012 8:28 am

Yancey Ward

David,
Frequently, cold snaps are preceded by strong southerly wind patterns, and in the South, this usually means warm moist Gulf air.

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October 14, 2012 8:29 am

Ack

These record lows, just lack the proper upward adjustments.

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October 14, 2012 8:32 am

jerry

nothing to see here, now move along

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October 14, 2012 8:34 am

ferdberple

David Thomas Bronzich says:
October 14, 2012 at 7:02 am
Interesting how on the last map there are red dots surrounded by light blue ones. Is it because those stations have accuracy problems?
=========
interesting observation. for example, look up around Seattle. We have record highs and lows all overlapped within a week. there must have been a massive die off in plants and animals around Seattle, unable to cope with this extreme climate disruption. it must have made the st helen’s volcano look like child’s play. no doubt the area has been declared a national disaster, with emergency funding in the billions rolling in to care for the casualties. after all, the ipcc tells us just a 2C warming in climate will spell disaster for the world. imagine what a daily 10C shift at seattle has done. Oh, poor seattle.

Is this really the game you want to play, Anthony?“In the continental USA, there were 137 high temperature type records versus 857 low temperature type records this past week , a 6-1 difference.”
In the continental USA, there were 1432 high temperature type records versus 121 low temperature type records ON MARCH 20,2012 , a 12-1 difference.“Last week there were 1154 low temperature type records …”
The previous day (March 19, 2012), there were 1217 high type records …
There are four INDIVIDUAL DAYS last March that EACH have more “high type records” than the WEEKLY 1154 “low type records” you are hyping. (With ratios ranging from 7-1 to 25-1)
October has recorded just over 2,000 “low type records” for the first two weeks. Let me know if we get another 12,000 “low type records” this month. Yep, October would need around 6,000 “low type records” for each of the next couple weeks to match last March’s mark for “high type records”.“Once again, if this had been summer, and the numbers reversed, you’d see Seth Borenstein writing articles for AP telling us this is ‘what global warming looks like’. So far not a peep out of Seth on this cold wave and what it is supposed to mean.”
Once again, this cold spell is way less intense than the warm spell in March, and probably less intense than many of the weekly warm spells throughout the year, but I don’t have time to do all that research for you. I do remember that June had ~ 3,000 record highs (and presumably about twice that number of “high type records”), so October is still well short of that number, too.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So, YES! this IS what global warming would look like — occasional small small excursions below normal temps, with more frequent, larger excursions above normal temps.

Mark S says:“…Christmas on December 25th? Global Warming!”
You had to go and bring religion into it. You have to keep with the secular religion of no religion, you might offend someone religion by referencing a religion. Non religion believers who hold no religion as their religion could get upset…
/sarc

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October 14, 2012 11:29 am

crosspatch

If you dig into those record high’s, particularly when they are surrounded by record lows, I have often spotted several incorrect reports. I remember a couple of years ago spotting a report of around 50F when no station around them exceeded 20F for the day.

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October 14, 2012 11:30 am

tjfolkerts

Out of curiosity, I know that temperatures are often “adjusted” when trying to determine regional or global temperatures (for various reasons with varying degrees of legitimacy). But are the actual daily records adjusted? For example, the “average” temperature of the US in the 1930’s has been adjusted downward, when calculated based on adjusted temperatures.
But are the individual actual records adjusted? For example, if the record high somewhere was set in 1932 at 106 F, is that specific record changed (to say 104 F), so that a new temperature of 105 F recorded this year would now be the “record”? I suspect that the “record” would still be listed as 106 F in 1932, but I would be curious to know which way it actually works.

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October 14, 2012 11:37 am

D Böehm

Tim Folkerts says:
“…YES! this IS what global warming would look like — occasional small small excursions below normal temps, with more frequent, larger excursions above normal temps.”
Show us the global warming.

So, YES! this IS what global warming would look like — occasional small small excursions below normal temps, with more frequent, larger excursions above normal temps.

Oh! Thankyou for that. Clearly, I have failed to keep up because – having read the most recent IPCC report – I thought global warming would look like this.http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-10-4.html
In the graph the orange line represents the “committed” temp increase the IPCC said would occur after 2000 if there were no additional CO2. Clearly, actual temps from 2000 until now are lower than the projected “committed” warming while CO2 levels have continued to rise.
But, of course, that projection was then, and it is now known that projection was plain wrong. You now say that projection is not what global warming would look like.
This week you say global warming would look like flat-lining global temperature with “occasional small small excursions below normal temps, with more frequent, larger excursions above normal temps”.Are you willing to say what global warming would look like next week?
Richard

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October 14, 2012 11:55 am

tjfolkerts

Ah — a testable hypothesis:

Once again, if this had been summer, and the numbers reversed, you’d see Seth Borenstein writing articles for AP ….

OK — here are numbers for July which ARE basically reversed (for 4 weeks, not just two) using the same source and methodology that Anthony used.
week; Highs; Lows; Ratio
WEEK 1: 3502; 215; 16:1
WEEK 2: 1197; 434; 3:1
WEEK 3: 1555; 314; 5:1
WEEK 4: 1534; 179; 9:1
hmmm … EVERY week in July was unusually hot in the the same way these past two weeks in October were unusually cool so we should be seeing articles every week. But Seth didn’t even bother writing about these — disproving Anthony’s hypothesis. After already writing one article about June, apparently records even more extreme than the one’s Anthony is hyping were not even worth a mention. So no, he did NOT write articles about similar weeks during the summer.
Once again, when October sets records at a rate seen in March, April, May, June, or July (let alone setting similar records for months on end) THEN I would expect articles about the unusual nature of widespread cooling in the US.

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October 14, 2012 12:32 pm

Lightrain

Yabut, it looks like 90% of the records are non-urban, therefore not subject to homogenization. I suspect these sites are not on the official Mann/Hansen list of qualifying sites.

Where’s that Lazy Teenager and his Kamikaze comments?
Come on Lazy…we need you to tell us how Warmists feel when 2000 individual low temperature records are broken.
We feel your pain.
Really.

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October 14, 2012 2:45 pm

Eliza

TJFOLkerts
\
Still hasnt answered show us the global warming.

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October 14, 2012 3:03 pm

Not Kevin Trenberth

Whether weather is climate or whether it’s not,
depends on whether it’s cold or it’s hot.
If it’s cold it’s just weather, whether or not
it’s cold all the time and never gets hot.
If it’s hot it’s the climate, whether or not
it was cold yesterday and just now it got hot.
So, weather is climate whenever it’s hot,
but climate’s just weather whenever it’s not.

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October 14, 2012 4:05 pm

Mark S

GeoLurking wrote:
“You had to go and bring religion into it.”
I thought Christmas was a commercial holiday. Buy! Buy! Buy!

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October 14, 2012 4:45 pm

eric1skeptic

TJFolkerts asks “But are the individual actual records adjusted? For example, if the record high somewhere was set in 1932 at 106 F, is that specific record changed (to say 104 F), so that a new temperature of 105 F recorded this year would now be the “record”? I suspect that the “record” would still be listed as 106 F in 1932, but I would be curious to know which way it actually works.”
No, there is no adjustment. That’s one reason why the number of high records keeps rising because urbanization and local site heating (concrete, etc) raise overnight mins creating new high min records. Urbanization also raises highs, but not as much as it raises lows.

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October 14, 2012 5:42 pm

David W

Perhaps a more accurate measurement would be to count the number of record anomalies if in fact accurate adjusmtents are made for these anomalies in respect to UHI.
As Eric has stated with UHI being a huge factor it would be almost impossible to see more low records than high.

Nah. That’s the modern term for “manic-depressive”. Not pertinent.
All we’re seeing is the continued demonstration that no falsification of AGW is acknowledged, permitted, or offered.

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October 14, 2012 7:16 pm

phlogiston

ferd berple says:
October 14, 2012 at 6:33 amAGW is old news. It is Climate Change that is the problem. Every fall human CO2 emissions cause the climate to change. In the Northern hemisphere is gets cold, in the southern hemisphere it gets hot. Every spring human CO2 causes it to change again in the reverse direction. This disrupts climate, thus it is called Climate Disruption. This process has been going on for as long as there have been humans on the planet, thus humans are the cause. We know this to be true because the US government has spent $100 billion paying scientists to say it is true.
There’s more. Every working day, the CO2 emissions from industry make the atmosphere more transparent, making it look lighter. Then after 5pm it all stops, CO2 falls and the sky darkens. Before there were humans, there was no artificial pollutant-artefact of “night and day” – just an unending Edenic twilight.

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October 14, 2012 8:46 pm

Matt

These lows are just weather, whereas a warm Oct would surely indicate AGW. We should either wait for the proper adjustments made to make the numbers reasonable (… see umployement rate), or look up for sth sophisticated explaining that cooling is caused by warming…
Matt

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October 15, 2012 12:17 am

izen

Kurtosis is the key factor.
AGW predicts that as varience increases with a temperature increase there WILL be more high AND low records set.
It is what is meant by increasing extremes in the weather record because of climate change.
It requires a particularly naive grasp of climate science to view a bout of extreme clod weather as a refutation of AGW when it is precisely the opposite.

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October 15, 2012 6:02 am

John@EF

D Böehm says:
October 14, 2012 at 11:46 am
John@EF,
=====
Well, D, thanks for your response to my post, which listed stats pointing to the fundamental silliness of the original post and its basis for a discussion thread, generally. You’ll note that that post was “disappeared”. Great site.

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October 15, 2012 7:03 am

eric1skeptic

izen, what exactly is “varience” and how does AGW increase “varience”?

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October 15, 2012 7:17 am

izen

@- eric1skeptic
“izen, what exactly is “varience” and how does AGW increase “varience”? ”
Varience is the same as variance for those who do not obsess about spelling trivia that has no effect on the meaning.
AGW increases varience because as the average temperature increases the distribution of the magnitude of events widens, the effect of changing kurtosis.

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October 15, 2012 7:49 am

D Böehm

Izen says:
“It requires a particularly naive grasp of climate science to view a bout of extreme clod weather as a refutation of AGW when it is precisely the opposite.”
Translation: “Cooling = warming.”
Your cherry-picking of selected weather events is a lame attempt to get around the null hypothesis, which has never been falsified.

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October 15, 2012 7:53 am

eric1skeptic

izen, thanks for spelling kurtosis correctly. Please be specific as to what you are claiming. When you claim that AGW widens the distribution of the “magnitude of events”, what is the event and what is the magnitude? Are you saying the distribution of temperatures for any station widens? Or the distribution of all temperatures for all stations? I doubt the latter is true, the former might be true for some stations but not others.

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October 15, 2012 9:43 am

izen

@- eric1skeptic
“Are you saying the distribution of temperatures for any station widens? Or the distribution of all temperatures for all stations? I doubt the latter is true, the former might be true for some stations but not others.”
This post highlights the MANY stations that have set both high and low records this year. I would doubt that all stations show this, but it is clear that most do.
It seems odd that a site that has been rejecting the finding of more extreme weather as a result of AGW in post after post this summer should identify and publicise the clear evidence of the increasing records set by the widening varience.

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October 15, 2012 10:28 pm

izen

@- D Böehm
“Your cherry-picking of selected weather events is a lame attempt to get around the null hypothesis, which has never been falsified.”
Which null hypothesis is that ?
The null hypothesis that the rising CO2 has no effect on the change in climate has been comprehensively refuted by direct observation of the changes in the energy spectra of the outgoing and downwelling LWR, The continuing increase in ocean heat content and the exceptional nature of the recent century long trend in temperatures and ice melt.
It is not I who cherry-picked these records, they are being hyped by this thread. Just as the summer records were being minimised by this site.

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